During electoral campaigns candidates present a list of policy goals that they intend to achieve in case of victory. Achieving campaign promises implies to translate electoral preferences in concrete policy measures during the years of the mandate to come. With this respect, is there any difference between “left” and “right” wing parties? Is there any difference between electoral and non-electoral times? In this paper, I study policy agendas stability and change in four countries (Denmark, France, Spain and United-Kingdom) accounting for the influence of partisan alternation, elections, and institutional configuration over 30 years.
Using indicators from the Comparative Agendas Project I build an index of agenda stability to investigate whether changes in attention to policy issues are driven by partisan alternation and elections. Results show that policy agendas are characterized by very high levels of stability independently from partisan alternation in government, from elections, and from the policy issue considered.
